The Service Experience: Sprint/Nextel

I am a Nextel faithful. I have had the direct connect service since high school and there is nothing that compares with it. Unfortunately, Sprint bought Nextel a few years back, and as predicted by Nextel customers, it was the end of all customer service as we know it.

Because of the insane amount of money that I spend with Sprint on a monthly basis (unlimited Blackberry service, unlimited mobile broadband card service), I get better customer service than most, but the service experience itself (quality of coverage, consistency of billing, amount and frequency of marketing message)… well that’s just crap.

The biggest problem I have right now is this: I am a paperless girl. PLEASE send me my bill by email as a PDF and let’s work together to endless printing and tree killing. I have not received a bill by email the last two months (and I’ve checked my spam filter and all the other little tricks). I DID however receive an email telling me my bill is two months past due. And three text messages.

So why the big complaint?

1) My text messages are CONSISTENTLY a day late, or more. They are never instant. It’s pretty much synonymous with Sprint.

2) I have a big problem with a service provider who cannot seamlessly provide its customers the services they are paying for in a consistent and timely manner and even more so when they can get THEIR messages to me though, when they feel I owe them too much money. (You can get the past due email to me, but not the monthly emails? You can get the “bill due” text message to me, but never any other texts?)

If I had received my bill as arranged to begin with, the payment due date and amount due would’ve gone immediately on my calendar with a 5-day reminder attached to it.

A disconnect in the service experience like this indicates two things to me as a consumer:

1) They value me paying my bill more than they do actually providing the services I’m paying for.

2) I’m paying a premium for this provider but not receiving superior follow-through. Could I easily cut my bill by $50 a month with a competitor and receive the same quality of service? Betcha I could!

Hmm… decisions, decisions, decisions.

I will say one positive thing about Sprint – when you call the 888-number, you are almost always given the option in the voice prompts for “to speak to a representative, press 0”. Definitely necessary to get a live body on the other end for issues like this.